A Dublin student was handed a three year suspended sentence yesterday after being caught in possession of nearly €19,000 worth of cannabis.
Dayo Awosanya, a 20 year old bioscience student, plead guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on 12 June 2017 to possessing the alleged amount of cannabis. The student in question had no previous convictions.
The student had been arrested in circumstances that the arresting officer, Garda Barry, described as unique. Mr. Awosanya's mother had become concerned that there was something awry after noticing a strange smell in her son's room. She soon found a large amount of herbal cannabis in a rucksack in her son's wardrobe and quickly called a garda she knew. The judge commended her as a "woman of courage and principle".
The defending lawyer, Richard Wixted BL, said that his defendant was holding the drugs for a friend, and believed he would be given some money for doing so, but had presumed the value of the drugs to only be around €1,000. He said that Mr. Awosanya wouldn't have gotten involved if he'd known their true worth. This was the version of events put forward by the arresting Garda who had described the student as being 'extremely co-operative' during interviews and having been extremely remorseful for ending up in such a situation.
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Mr. Wixted had said that the student had been spending approximately €50 a week on cannabis for himself, however since his arrest he had stopped using cannabis and had severed contact from the peer group he had been associating with at the time of his arrest. It was put to the judge that the student had originally only started taking cannabis as a way of dealing with his mother's recent cancer diagnosis.
The judge, describing his decision to mete out a three year suspended sentence, said that he had taken into account the defendant's previous clean record, his willingness to co-operate with police, his good career prospects and the fact of his early guilty plea.
H/T: Journal.ie
